A real conversation always contains an invitation. You are inviting another person to reveal herself or himself to you, to tell you who they are or what they want.
Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are. To become honest is in effect to become fully and robustly incarnated into powerlessness.
To admit regret is to understand that we are fallible - that there are powers beyond us. To admit regret is to lose control not only of a difficult past but of the very story we tell about our present. To admit sincere and abiding regret is one of our greatest but unspoken contemporary sins.
Honesty is grounded in humility and indeed in humiliation, and in admitting exactly where we are powerless.
Without the compassionate understanding of the fear and trepidation that lie behind courageous speech, we are bound only to our arrogance.
It is not the thing you fear that you must deal with: it is the mother of the thing you fear.
The ultimate lesson is that there is no immunity, no matter our age or the size of our retirement account, from going through constant cycles of integration and disintegration in which we are humbled and hopefully set to rights with the world again.
Things have a way of being richer in the end, a product better made, for the circuitous route we take to include all the elements that are necessary for a job well done.
Stop trying to change reality by attempting to eliminate complexity.
Questions that have no right to go away are those that have to do with the person we are about to become; they are conversations that will happen with or without our conscious participation.
The marvelous thing about a good question is that it shapes our identity as much by the asking as it does by the answering.
There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.
A good poem brims with reflected beauty and even a bracing, beautiful ugliness. At the center of our lives, in the midst of the busyness and the forgetting, is a story that makes sense when everything extraneous has been taken away.
All of our great traditions, religious, contemplative and artistic, say that you must a learn how to be alone - and have a relationship with silence. It is difficult, but it can start with just the tiniest quiet moment.
We learn, grow and become compassionate and generous as much through exile as homecoming, as much through loss as gain, as much through giving things away as in receiving what we believe to be our due.
Lion sounds that have not grown from the mouse may exude naked power... but cannot convey any wisdom or understanding... The initial steps on the path to courageous speech then are the first tentative steps into the parts of us that cannot speak.
Poetry is often the art of overhearing yourself say things you didn't know you knew. It is a learned skill to force yourself to articulate your life, your present world or your possibilities for the future.
I believe that human beings are desperate, always, to belong to something larger than themselves.
Poetry gives us courage and sets us straight with the world. Poems are great companions and friends.
Poetry is a street fighter. It has sharp elbows. It can look after itself. Poetry can't be used for manipulation; it's why you never see good poetry in advertising.
